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THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
a natural constitution different at some point from that which a
materialistic world would have. It must be such that different events
can be expected in it, different conduct must be required.
This thoroughly “pragmatic” view of religion has usually been
taken as a matter of course by common men. They have inter-
polated divine miracles into the field of nature, they have built
a heaven out beyond the grave. It is only transcendentalist meta-
physicians who think that, without adding any concrete details to
Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling it the expression
of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it stands. I believe
the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives
it body as well as soul, it makes its claim, as everything real must
claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the
more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow
of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. But
the over-belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is
that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade
me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of
many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds
must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also;
and that although in the main their experiences and those of this
world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points,
and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure
to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true. I
can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist’s attitude, and
imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws
and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward
monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word
“bosh!” Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name,
and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objec-
tively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow “scientific” bounds.
Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament, — more
intricately built than physical science allows. So my objective and
my subjective conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I
express. Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here
below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in
turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?
POSTSCRIPT
401
POSTSCRIPT
I
N writing my concluding lecture I had to aim so much at
simplification that I fear that my general philosophic position
received so scant a statement as hardly to be intelligible to some
of my readers. I therefore add this epilogue, which must also be so
brief as possibly to remedy but little the defect. In a later work I
may be enabled to state my position more amply and consequently
more clearly.
Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all the
attitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in
literature long ago, and where any new writer can immediately be
classed under a familiar head. If one should make a division of all
thinkers into naturalists and supernaturalists, I should undoubtedly
have to go, along with most philosophers, into the supernaturalist
branch. But there is a crasser and a more refined supernaturalism,
and it is to the refined division that most philosophers at the pres-
ent day belong. If not regular transcendental idealists, they at least
obey the Kantian direction enough to bar out ideal entities from
interfering causally in the course of phenomenal events. Refined
supernaturalism is universalistic supernaturalism; for the “crasser”
variety “piecemeal” supernaturalism would perhaps be the better
name. It went with that older theology which to-day is supposed to
reign only among uneducated people, or to be found among the few
belated professors of the dualisms which Kant is thought to have
displaced. It admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds
no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds
together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among
the forces that causally determine the real world’s details. In this
the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimen-
sions of existence. For them the world of the ideal has no efficient
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THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particu-
lar points. The ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but
only of the meaning of facts; it is a point of view for judging facts.
It appertains to a different “-ology,” and inhabits a different dimen-
sion of being altogether from that in which existential propositions
obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and
interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of nature, as
those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to
prayer, are bound to think it must.
Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular
Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in
communion with the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new
departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed among
the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic
supernaturalism surrenders, it seems to me, too easily to naturalism.
It takes the facts of physical science at their face-value, and leaves
the laws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy,
in case their fruits are bad. It confines itself to sentiments about
life as a whole, sentiments which may be admiring and adoring,
but which need not be so, as the existence of systematic pessi-
mism proves. In this universalistic way of taking the ideal world,
the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate. Both
instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to believe that
principles can exist which make no difference in facts.
1
But all
facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of the question
of God’s existence seems to me to lie in the consequences for par-
ticulars which that existence may be expected to entail. That no
concrete particular of experience should alter its complexion in
1
Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world makes this difference,
that facts exist. We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. “A world”
of fact! — that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest unit with which the
Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds work for the better ought to be done within
this world, setting in at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal affairs,
but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all the interests which our poor souls
compass raise their heads too late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world
absolutely, before this world was born. It is strange, I have heard a friend say, to see this
blind corner into which Christian thought has worked itself at last, with its God who can
raise no particular weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and who is on
the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd evolution from the God of David’s
psalms!
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